back audaciously"

"Then fell prone, head buried in her tumbled hair"

"'You can't go!' he said"

"And locked in his embrace, she lifted her lips to his"

CHAPTER I

A SKIRMISH

As the wind veered and grew cooler a ribbon of haze appeared above the
Gulf-stream.

Young Hamil, resting on his oars, gazed absently into the creeping mist.
Under it the ocean sparkled with subdued brilliancy; through it,
shoreward, green palms and palmettos turned silvery; and, as the fog
spread, the sea-pier, the vast white hotel, bathing-house, cottage,
pavilion, faded to phantoms tinted with rose and pearl.

Leaning there on his oars, he could still make out the distant sands
flecked with the colours of sunshades and bathing-skirts; the breeze
dried his hair and limbs, but his swimming-shirt and trunks still
dripped salt water.

Inshore a dory of the beach guard drifted along the outer line of
breakers beyond which the more adventurous bathers were diving from an
anchored raft. Still farther out moving dots indicated the progress of
hardier swimmers; one in particular, a girl capped with a brilliant red
kerchief, seemed to be already nearer to Hamil than to the shore.

It was all very new and interesting to him--the shore with its spectral
palms and giant caravansary, the misty, opalescent sea where a white
steam-yacht lay anchored north of him--the _Ariani_--from which he had
come, and on board of which the others were still doubtless
asleep--Portlaw, Malcourt, and Wayward. And at thought of the others he
yawned and moistened his lips, still feverish from last night's
unwisdom; and leaning forward on his oars, sat brooding, cradled by the
flowing motion of the sea.

The wind was still drawing into the north; he felt it, never strong, but
always a little cooler, in his hair and on his wet swimming-shirt. The
flat cloud along the Gulf-stream spread thickly coastward, and after a
little while the ghosts of things terrestrial disappeared.

All around him, now, blankness--save for the gray silhouette of the
_Ariani_. A colourless canopy surrounded him, centred by a tiny pool of
ocean. Overhead through the vanishing blue, hundreds of wild duck were
stringing out to sea; under his tent of fog the tarnished silver of the
water formed a floor smoothly unquiet.

Sounds from the land, hitherto unheard, now came strangely distinct; the
cries of bathers, laughter, the muffled shock of the surf, doubled and
red